Every technology professional who pays attention to politics is apoplectic about what happened in Iowa last night. My take(s), in thread form...
1. This was an unnecessary use of technology. While I have a self-interested motive to see more tech in more places (future job security), you don't need an app for everything. Especially when you have an effective and resilient process in place.
In the language of Agile, there was no BUSINESS VALUE in replacing humans making a phone calls to report results with an app. If they were 10x'ing the caucus locations, you could make the case, but that was never happening. The old system worked fine.
2. So this feels a bit like people doing technology for its own sake, which is almost always a bad idea, but is often what happens when you don't have your own internal strategy or expertise and instead rely on consultants.
Sadly, this is how a lot of companies, organizations, campaigns and causes operate. They really don't know any better, and well-connected consultancies can sell them all kinds of stuff they may or may not need.
This is in no way unique to politics, and projects go poorly for all sorts of reasons, but it reflects *very badly* on all of us when things like this occur.
3. By all accounts, the technology used here was comically under-funded, rushed, etc. $60k for an app and service to run a state-wide election is a joke. Whoever was tasked with actually building this thing was set up to fail.
In other words, #hugOps and solidarity to the developers.
In technology it can be hard to understand what things should cost, which is why again the internal expertise question is so incredibly vital. To a layperson, $60k might sound like a lot! That's as much as a Tesla costs, for just an app?
But actually building and operating mission-critical systems is not cheap. Or, at least, you get what you pay for. IMO whoever pitched this project in the first place committed an act of malpractice.
4. The ecosystem of technology vendors around campaigns and causes is... not great. There are a number of amazing shops out there, but also some grifters. Real serious expertise is thin on the ground.
This is actually a problem that goes beyond the world of non-profits and elections — there's a *critical gap* of technology expertise within the public sector overall.
It's trite to point out healthcare.gov but that's a result of the same dynamic playing out at larger scale. A disparate set of consultants (defense contractor types, mostly) won the deal, subbed it out, and nobody on the client side was in control.
We should expect great things in terms of technology from our public institutions. In order to get that, they need internal embedded technology expertise. We need a class of civil-servant software engineers, devops architects, and product managers.
Otherwise these things are going to continue running like any other big corporate IT project: over budget, behind schedule, and likely to fail.
The public works projects of the 21st century will include software. Let's try and make it insanely great.
The public works projects of the 21st century will include software. Let's try and make it insanely great.
